While Kevin Streett’s colleagues at the Jefferson County Public Utility District heaped praise upon him in the wake of his departure as the assistant general manager and electrical superintendent, Streett was a man of few words about the matter.

“It was time,” he said, adding he planned to spend the next few weeks helping his mother move and taking a road trip to visit his sons.

“He did not want to make a big deal of this,” Will O’Donnell, communications manager for the PUD, said of Streett. “He didn’t even want a going-away party.”

Last month marked the end of Streett’s six years at the PUD, and more than 40 years in the electrical business.

O’Donnell deemed Streett as “instrumental” in building the PUD’s electrical service division “from the ground up.”

When Streett began in November 2012, Jefferson County’s electrical service was owned and operated by Puget Sound Energy, which subcontracted its service and maintenance to Puyallup-based Potelco.

The former PSE yard, which the PUD now uses for operations and customer service, was empty. Outgoing PUD District 3 Commissioner Wayne King said it didn’t even contain a screwdriver.

As the PUD’s first electrical employee, Streett was responsible for building the division, not only by ordering equipment, supplies and vehicles, but also by recruiting, hiring and training new employees.

“Kevin Streett built this utility from scratch,” King said. “There’s not a lot of people who could have done that. We were very lucky to get him.”

The son of a nuclear engineer, Streett began his lifelong electrical career working with line crews during summers off from college at Boise State. Then he traveled the world to work on transmission and distribution projects for various contractors.

Streett served as operations manager, first at Overton Power District in Nevada, then at Navopache Electrical Co-op in Arizona.

During his tenure at the Jefferson County PUD, Streett updated and modernized the county’s aging electrical infrastructure.

“Some of the equipment I came across here, I had never seen before, and I began in this business in the 1980s,” Streett said. “We had, we still have, switches and transformers and meters from the 1960s. We’ve replaced a lot, but there’s still more to do.”

PUD General Manager Larry Dunbar said one of Streett’s biggest upgrades was the installation of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, which has improved reliability and allowed the crew to restore service rapidly and remotely from the operations center during outages.

“It’s a really impressive system for a district of this size,” Dunbar said.

Streett served as interim general manager for the PUD between Jim Parker’s departure in October 2017 and when Dunbar was hired this past April.

“Streett’s tenure as interim general manager was admittedly difficult,” O’Donnell said. “Not only did he have to deal with what became a contentious and controversial meter replacement campaign, as well as electric and water rate increases, but he remained in charge of keeping the county’s lights and power on.”

PUD Executive Assistant and Public Records Officer Annette Johnson was hired the same year as Streett.

“If there was an outage, Kevin would be here around the clock,” Johnson said. “He was absolutely dedicated to this PUD and will be sorely missed.”

Although O’Donnell was not able to offer a timetable for hiring a replacement, he noted the PUD would bring in a temporary operations supervisor to oversee the line crew.

“Larry is doing some restructuring in the organization to fill in from Kevin’s departure,” O’Donnell said. “We’re trying to make smaller and more evenly distributed work groups within the company. Kevin was in charge of so much that he’s leaving a big hole to fill. We’d need to hire three people to replace the amount of work and responsibility he carried if we were just to backfill his job directly.”

Dunbar plans to break up the electrical division into two groups, with the line crew overseen by a new interim operations supervisor, and the engineering group run by PUD Senior Electrical Engineer Jimmy Scarborough. Dunbar’s plan calls for less than 10 people to be in each group.